Foreign Perspectives

Although you might think that five years would be more than enough time to get settled into a new area, in our case it seems that the local tax authorities still haven’t recognised that we actually live here!

The reason for that is largely down to a seemingly small thing that the accountant should have done in early 2006. Well, I say “the accountant” but in fact the accountant that was dealing with us got pregnant in 2005 and left the firm after the birth. Thus the personal tax return that she was to have done for us in January 2006 wasn’t done.

Ordinarily that wouldn’t have mattered, but her firm just put all the files for her clients to the one side when she left and thus in October 2006 we started to get threatening letters from the tax people for non-completion of various tax forms. So, late in 2006 they started work on those but in fact they only got to the end of those early in 2008 (yes, two years late) and by then had forgotten about that January 2006 return.

Since we’d not done that 2006 return we weren’t marked as being resident here which meant that we didn’t get any Taxe Habitation (property tax) demands until well into 2008 and even then they were for 2007 onward. However, we also didn’t get the reductions in tax due to residents thus find ourselves having overpaid something like EUR 12,000 by this point.

Not only that but because of the lack of being marked as resident we now find ourselves getting three separate demands for the TV license from three separate tax offices. We paid the first one to arrive which has totally thrown the system as the other two are now getting ready to send out the baliffs for non-payment of the TV license which as it turns out we paid about two months early but apparently to the wrong tax office.

Still, they do appear to be close to recognising that we live here… just as we’re preparing to leave!